Saturday, October 29, 2011

The End, Part One:

William Gaddis’ Pre-Postness

If you’re a
reader who enjoys parsing and categorizing literature’s complex strands of influence
and development, you’ve probably puzzled over the definitions of Modernism and
Postmodernism and have tried to make sense of how the former led to (or became,
or ascended to, or degenerated into) the latter. Most readers will agree that
James Joyce’s Ulysses is the standard for Modernism, and many will agree
that Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow embodies Postmodernism in a
great number of its facets, but what writers and sensibilities link these two
representative works? Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Djuna
Barnes all play a part in developing the Modernist aesthetic, but all of these
writers surround or follow Joyce in one way or another and don’t suggest much
of a bridge toward the second half of the century. After the Second World War
(in striking contrast to after the First), many of the most influential
writers—Saul Bellow, John Updike, and John Cheever, for instance—seemed to have
retreated to the more conventional approaches of the nineteenth-century novel.
Exceptions such as Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and John Hawkes are
shimmering examples of writers not hemmed in by this arrière-garde aesthetic, but none of them
could in any way be considered Postmodern—or even leading toward it. Jorge Luis
Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were also uncategorizable mavericks, and their
textual games definitely had a huge influence on what could be done on the
written page, but the writer who almost directly seems to link the avant-garde “isms”
of Joyce’s Modernism to Pynchon’s Postmodernism is William Gaddis, the solitary
standard-bearer of great art in all of its multifaceted registers.

In 1955, at the Jesus-like age of
thirty-three, William Gaddis published his debut novel, The Recognitions,
a monumental lexicon work that went largely unread but that deeply influenced
every writer with the fortitude to wade through its 1,000 pages. It’s been said
of the rock band the Velvet Underground that when they were still together as a
group only a few hundred people ever bought their records but that every one of
them went on to form a band, and a similar thing could be said about readers of
The Recognitions. In the 1990s, as the editor of a newspaper’s Books
Page, I had the opportunity to interview many of our era’s most interesting
writers, and almost all of the most brilliant and innovative of them—most
notably Cynthia Ozick, David Foster Wallace (R.I.P.), and Rikki Ducornet—cited The
Recognitions as an enormous influence. Each of these writers went into
rapturous and unmitigated praise for Gaddis, and Ducornet specifically said
that reading The Recognitions made her realize that there wasn’t
anything that you couldn’t do in fiction.

Set in almost precisely the time of
its publication, The Recognitions contains all of the themes, concerns,
and techniques missing from the writing of nearly all of Gaddis’ post-War
contemporaries. The novel’s main character, Wyatt Gwyon, is a painter of
extraordinary talent, and his ascent/descent into the world of art charts a
nearly Dantean journey through the heavens, purgatories, and hells of both
modern art and modern life. Wyatt Gwyon and William Gaddis each have enormous
palettes that contain thousands of years of artistic influence, and both face
a world with very little interest in or capacity to understand their
simultaneously modern and ancient approaches. Wyatt builds an aesthetic and a
technique all his own, and he seems to have a chance at making a place for
himself in the New York art world, but just before his debut showing a crucial
critic visits him and demands payment for a positive review. With the critic’s
praise Wyatt will almost certainly become the star that he deserves to be, but
his artistic integrity is so insulted that he simply can’t participate in such
a scheme, and as a consequence the critic pans his work and puts an end to his
viability as a working artist. This plunges Wyatt into the first level of an
artistic relativity that could be viewed alternatively as heaven, hell, or
purgatory. In one sense he’s damned, and in another he’s totally free and pure,
and in another he’s in a period of indefinite waiting. The wait eventually ends
when he receives an even more sinister visitor. This time it’s a businessman
who’s aware of Wyatt’s uncanny talent—and of his poor prospects—and he proposes
that Wyatt paint forgeries of lost or never-before-seen or even fabled Flemish
masterpieces that will command fortunes on the post-War art market. With a
swirling combination of fascination, resignation, cynicism, and disgust, Wyatt
makes a kind of why-the-hell-not assent—an agreement that’s both a pact with
the devil and a fuck-you to the devils of the modern art world—and begins his next
step into the world of endless artistic relativity.

As Wyatt invents and executes works
in the perfect style of Dieric Bouts and Hugo van der Goes and the Master of Flémalle,
the novel explores the farthest limits of originality, authority, falsehood,
and utter blasphemy. Surrounding Wyatt is an astonishing portrait gallery of
fakes, usurpers, pretenders, and even a few originals. With Wyatt as a kind of W.G.-double
for Gaddis himself, the novel abounds in endless other doubles for Wyatt and
for so many of the mirror-layers of people around him. The most fascinating are
Stanley, the brilliant composer who’s endlessly weaving together a score that
serves as a double for The Recognitions itself—a work that, like The
Recognitions, would have been liturgical in an earlier age but that in
modern times has no such foundational structure to attach itself to or to
encompass it—and, functioning as a much more comic double, Otto, the self-styled
writer who sutures together a hilariously idiotic play, The Vanity of Time,
that’s nothing more than a series of intellectual-sounding quotes that he
overhears people trot out at parties, mostly comprising selected sound-bites of
the classic literature that he’s never heard or even heard of. When people read
Otto’s play they all say that it seems incredibly familiar, but nobody can say
exactly why. Both Stanley and Otto are sincere searchers in their own ways,
however, and Gaddis allows us to feel as much empathy with the struggling
composer as with the struggling poseur.

The central panel of Hugo van der Goes’Portinari Altarpiece, 1475

Gaddis is far from a sympathetic
writer, though, and many of his portraits are grotesque caricatures designed to
humiliate and to lampoon. Nevertheless, these portraits strike us with deep
recognition, as they are intended to do, and we as readers are forced to face
our own many-layered skins of facade and pretence and to search for something
original and true underneath. One of the major themes of the novel is the near-impossibility
of originality—especially for a writer floating in the wake of James Joyce—but
somehow Gaddis manages to create something resonantly original in this novel of
echoing derivatives. Despite its endless pessimism, The Recognitions—like
Gravity’s Rainbow—manages to be a thoroughly positive and triumphant
creation amid all its horror and gloom. And the similarities between Gaddis and
Pynchon (and Joyce) don’t end there. Many readers have seen how Gravity’s
Rainbow is a kind of heir to Ulysses’ encyclopedic linguistic and
artistic range, and a study of the two novels’ arcs shows that each follows a 3/4
trajectory of a full circle (eighteen hours of a day in Ulysses, and
nine months of a year in Gravity’s Rainbow), and a study of The
Recognitions will show how its own motley arc dovetails with many aspects
of Ulysses to influence Pynchon’s rainbow. Both Ulysses and The
Recognitions immerse themselves in ordinary life and combine low and high
culture into a radical mix of fluctuating levels of meaning, juxtaposing
popular songs and advertisements with the most elevated artistic influences.
Gaddis delves more deliberately into the absurdities of modern life than does
Joyce—and with much more distaste—and because The Recognitions’
protagonist’s rarefied talent is forced to search for a home at street level
(in contrast to Ulysses’ protagonist, Leopold Bloom, whose humane and
humble viewpoint is almost strictly street level), Gaddis’ kaleidoscope
of the ancient and the modern shows us the sicknesses of contemporary life in a
way that still makes a deep distinction between high and low, admitting no true
relativity. Like Dante, who encompasses all of what he considers to be the
worst and the best in humanity within his Comedy and stratifies it all
with harsh judgments while allowing us to be highly entertained at each step,
Gaddis’ supreme artistry keeps us constantly enthralled and amused as The
Recognitions weaves its way through what its author considers to be either
spiritually worthy or hilariously degenerate. Taking this mixture of high and
low to its farthest extreme, however, Gravity’s
Rainbow simply goes all the way into cultural and artistic relativity.
Pynchon can be just as moralistic and harsh as Gaddis, especially when he’s
dealing with degenerate Nazis and degenerate Americans who have much more in
common than anyone would like to believe, but Pynchon’s artistic approach gives
Tin Pan Alley tunes and comic books and Hollywood actors the same significance
as William Shakespeare.

The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, 1500,attributed to Hieronymus Bosch

Despite their philosophical differences, The
Recognitions and Gravity’s Rainbow follow similar arcs of
devolution as their protagonists dis-integrate into a spreading and
particularizing descent, the widening scopes taking ever more into their
seemingly picaresque and absurd but highly controlled rainbow journeys, and while
Gravity’s Rainbow’s wholehearted embrace of all influence is part of
what makes it a quintessentially Postmodern novel (although it can definitely
be argued that Joyce already did this and has never been surpassed), The
Recognitions is most certainly post-something. Its clear relationship to Ulysses
definitely makes it post-Joyce, and in some ways its relationship to the
thousands of years of seemingly forgotten high art make it post-everything.
It’s a novel that thrusts us into the modern world while desperately looking
back at all that’s been mutated or perverted or simply lost to the contemporary
mind. But Gaddis and his novel are as contemporary as the emptinesses they
parody, and even though his novel’s novel combinations of notes seem to doom it
and its author to the same imploding self-interment as Stanley and his completed musical
score, their existence and influence have been embraced by a still living and still
evolving literary culture and have been kept from serving as merely a cultural
swan song. The Recognitions is at once a stand-alone masterpiece and a prophetic document of literary and cultural postness, but in retrospect its
pre-posthumous stance seems as premature (and perhaps as preposterous) as it is
prescient, and it’s important to remember that it was only the first of Gaddis’
many novels, showing us that even the end has a continuation.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Play’s the Thing:

Although
Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille are often thought of as the greatest
French literary artists of the late seventeenth century, their extraordinary
plays standing as what we now think of as “Classical” French theater, it was the
shrewd fable-writer Jean de La Fontaine who produced perhaps the richest body
of work of his period. Both his lexicon and his vast array of influences dwarf
those of his contemporaries, and his varied and innovative use of rhyme schemes
influenced nearly every poet on the continent, including the later Russian poet
Alexander Pushkin, whose famous Eugene Onegin stanza can be found in
several places in La Fontaine’s fables. The trouble is that it’s nearly impossible
to find a serious edition of La Fontaine’s fables in English. Even in France
most editions are geared toward children and contain only the most simple and
facile samples of his work, and the English translations almost uniformly
transform his ingenious rhythms into sing-song nursery rhymes that lose nearly
all of the fables’ wit and subtlety. As with Vladimir Nabokov’s literal
translation of Eugene Onegin, La Fontaine—along with all other poets—requires
an unrhymed translation, and after searching for years for a suitable edition,
chance handed me a first-rate dual-language version published, surprisingly, as
a Dover Books original.

Edited and translated by Stanley
Appelbaum, who provides an excellent introduction, helpful notes to the fables,
and an exceptionally thorough key to La Fontaine’s sources—which range from
Aesop to Aristotle to Horace to the Desert Fathers to Rabelais, as well as to
any number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century fable-writers and
fable-collectors who’d brought tales from as far away as India and Persia and
Java—this edition is an ideal (if too short) introduction to La Fontaine for
both the serious and casual English reader.

Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portraitof Jean de La Fontaine, 1690

Culling seventy-five of the most
famous and artistically significant fables from La Fontaine’s long career—he
wrote 244 fables in all, filling several books over the course of a quarter of
a century—Appelbaum’s edition of the Selected Fables offers an excellent
sampling of the poet’s evolving and ever-widening approach to the genre.
Opening with the well-known “The Cicada and the Ant,” La Fontaine’s version of
Aesop’s “The Grasshopper and the Ant”—a fable that Nabokov hilariously
plays with in his 1962 novel Pale Fire—the
collection spends only a short number of pages on the early period of fables
that most other editions focus on entirely. “The Crow and the Fox,” “The City Rat
and the Country Rat,” The Wolf and the Lamb,” and “The Lion and the Rat” are
known by practically everyone and require no explanation other than to say that
they’re all more incisive and revealing in literal translation than they are in
any watered-down retelling or retooling. La Fontaine examines human nature with
an acute eye, and his use of animals in our place allows him to be as direct a
commentator on the way we live our lives as any philosopher or essayist. In
fact, the animal-skins that he places over our actions perhaps allow him to
penetrate even farther into our foolishness and greed and cruelty than he could
have if he’d have been writing in a different genre. La Fontaine relied heavily
on patronage, but he was never well liked by Louis XIV, and some of his best
fables—from all periods of his career—explore the uses and abuses of power,
with lions and lambs and rats standing in our exposed and uneasy stead.

His fables growing in length,
complexity, and scope, La Fontaine takes on increasingly ambitious challenges
as he progresses, both in terms of form and content. His meta-fable “The Power
of Fables” addresses contemporary relations between France and England by way
of ancient Athens and Macedonia, and in the process he illustrates the spells that
fables can cast on us as they blind us to the true dangers of the world, thus
enchanting the reader with his own spell while revealing the trick and negating
his own purpose and importance. Digging deeper, his “Discourse to Madame de la
Sablière” brilliantly refutes Descartes’ theory that animals don’t possess the
same form of intelligence as human beings, with the fable-within-a-fable “The
Two Rats, the Fox, and the Egg” holding an interior mirror up to an example of
animal ingenuity that easily rivals our own and that makes us recognize
ourselves in even the most seemingly primitive creatures.

J.J. Grandville’s illustration of“The Cicada and the Ant,” 1938

Going so far as to raise the animals
that populate his fables to our own qualitative rank, La Fontaine attains to
the level of philosophy while at the same time decentralizing the human mind
that creates philosophy—an ouroboros much like the self-negating “The Power of
Fables.” But as in “The Power of Fables,” La Fontaine’s fables are often as
much about reveling in the pleasures and diversions of human and animal nature
as they are about the profound reflection found in them. This lightness of play
keeps him from falling into turgid sophistry, and combined with his poetic
brilliance, his playfulness raises his fables onto a stage easily on par with
the great playwrights of his day. “The world is old, people say, and I believe
it,” La Fontaine writes. “All the same/It still needs to be entertained like a
child.”

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

A
Brief Rewarding Bliss:

The historical
Saint Brendan was born in Ireland in the late fifth century and is thought to
have lived for approximately one hundred years, and although it’s widely
accepted that he founded several monastic cells in his native country, little
else is known for certain about the true events of his life. As with most
medieval saints, he’s more of a product of legend than he is of verifiable
records, and among the saints of his period, his legacy is perhaps the most
fantastical. Any fan of medieval literature knows that vague knowledge often
lends itself to gorgeous visions and revisions by later seers and thinkers, and
as recorded in the utterly crystalline travel narrative The Voyage of Saint
Brendan, his is one of the most moving and compelling legends in all of
religious literature.

Written perhaps as early as two
hundred years after his death, and almost certainly based on a combination of
earlier written and oral versions, as well as on other intertwining folk and
epic elements, The Voyage of Saint Brendan recounts Brendan’s seven-year
pilgrimage in search of “the Promised Land of the Saints.” This isn’t
Palestine, the Biblical Promised Land, but rather an island where the sun never
sets and where visitors never get tired or hungry and are filled at all times
with complete satisfaction and bliss. Brendan hears of this land from Saint
Barrind, a traveling monk who visits Brendan’s monastery at Clonfert, and in
response he immediately assembles fourteen chosen monks who as a group resolve
to make the journey to their Promised Land.

After building a boat and preparing
to embark, however, a trio of monks from Brendan’s monastery rush to join them,
pleading that they will die on the spot if they aren’t allowed to make the
voyage too. Brendan admits them to their company, but with Christlike
clairvoyance, which he exhibits throughout the narrative, he proclaims that God
has prepared a special place for one of them along their journey but that the
other two are doomed to meet a “hideous judgment.” Thus none of the three is
destined to make it to the Promised Land of the Saints, and two of them are
destined for Hell, but Brendan remains silent about which is which, his words
setting up a tension that the reader looks forward to following but which is
borne out with a hilarious inattention to the reader’s attentiveness.

On the trip the group encounter
marvels that rival The Odyssey in
strangeness, but at less than one hundred pages, The Voyage of Saint Brendan is itself a marvel of succinct purity. They
visit an island that turns out to be an enormous fish named Jasconius, an
uninhabited island where food is magically left prepared for them—an episode
that seems to have made it into C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, along
with a few other of this book’s most striking scenarios—and an island called
the Paradise of the Birds, where a tree teeming with birds, which are in fact
souls that were destroyed during Lucifer’s fall but which are themselves
blameless and are allowed to assume corporeal form on holy days and Sundays,
sings God’s praises with one voice. The travelers also encounter a “coagulated”
sea, which is probably ice, and which from the description the narrative’s
writer had clearly never seen, as well as a stunning crystal pillar that rises from
the sea up into heaven. Commentators have suggested that this crystal pillar may
be an iceberg, which the writer would never have seen either but which through
a combination of mutated tellings and a cloistered imagination (it seems clear
that the writer was quite literate but had probably never left his monastery)
becomes a fantastical vision of the most sublime order.

For
the modern reader, The Voyage of Saint Brendan also offers many
accidental pleasures common to medieval literature, ranging from comical
contradictions to mind-boggling howlers. When they arrive at the island of
Ailbe, they find a community of monks who are sworn to silence, but upon
meeting them, their abbot engages Brendan in by far the most verbose discussion
in the book, during which he explains why the monks in his community don’t age,
even though they seem ancient and are described as having “snow-white” hair.
The most astonishing lapse, however, is in how the text deals with the three
uninvited monks: When the first one turns out to be possessed by “a small
Ethiopian,” which jumps from his breast before he dies, there’s no moment when the
other two uninvited monks look at each other or anyone says anything like,
“Hmm, I wonder which of these other two is doomed.” The book just
continues its journey, paying no heed to how the monks (or the reader) would
have reacted to this important shift in information. Then even more amazingly,
when Brendan decrees that the second latecomer has found his place among the
Island of the Three Choirs, signifying that he’s the one of the three
latecomers who isn’t doomed, there isn’t a peep from (or about) the remaining
extra monk, whom the reader instantly knows to be destined for Hell. It’s as if
this revelation wouldn’t create an overwhelming impression on everyone
involved, who all just keep traveling along without a word, and the book’s
complete silence about it is simply startling—and amusing—beyond belief.

Attempting
to tease out the real geography of The Voyage of Saint Brendan—or to
manipulate it to their uses—many modern readers have tried to make the claim
that Brendan beat both Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus to the New World.
As with so many other cases of scholars going to any length to bend a text to
the benefit of some particular nationality or cause, this is of course just
another laughable case of wishful reading. First of all, it doesn’t seem
possible that Brendan’s small ship—a currach—could
ever make it that far across the Atlantic. And just examining the book’s
internal evidence—if anything in this book could be used as serious evidence—the
group makes the same small circuit all seven years of their journey, following
the same rituals each year and not venturing beyond the magical geography that
only the most dedicated reviser of reality could attempt to locate on any
modern map of the world.

Simply reading The Voyage of Saint
Brendan for what it is—a thoroughly credulous book of wonders written by a
true believer of perhaps the early tenth century—we’re left with a narrative of
surpassing beauty whose unsophisticated construction only adds to its sense of
uncluttered purity. Brendan’s seven-year circuit of devotions—which is rewarded
by a mere forty days of bliss in the Promised Land of the Saints, followed
immediately afterward by his death on the book’s final page—fills the reader
with a similar kind of devoted bliss, whether we share any of the book’s faith
or not. Reason tells us that this is all religious hogwash, but the pleasures
of this book, as with any book of great beauty, are almost all beyond reason.
As with Dante or Milton, we criticize and argue with the text’s fundamental wrongness,
but in suspending our disbelief and surrendering our imagination to it, we’re
afforded a brief bliss that may be one of our truest rewards in life.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart:

Not many writers
have the distinction—or the notoriety—of having a psycho-sexual term named
after them. The astonishing and ingenious sexual cruelties in the Marquis de
Sade’s works—particularly in The 120 Days of Sodom—have made his name a
byword, and in 1890 the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced
the word “sadism” into medical terminology, even though the sole manuscript of The
120 Days of Sodom had yet to be discovered and published, the full fury of
which would come to wildly intensify the meaning of the term. Fittingly in the
shadow of the overpowering de Sade, the Austrian writer Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch inspired the term for sadism’s flip-side, masochism, which was
also introduced by Krafft-Ebing. Von Sacher-Masoch was a historian, folklorist,
collector of stories, and progressive thinker of the mid-to-late 1900s, but
even though he produced dozens of books in any number of genres, he’s almost
solely known for his infamous novella Venus in Furs.

Initially meant to be part of an
epic novel-sequence called The Legend of
Cain, whose grandiose plan von Sacher-Masoch abandoned after a few volumes,
Venus in Furs was published as the
fourth part of the first book, which was entitled Love. Each book was named after one of the “evils” that Cain
introduced into the world, and with this underlying premise—that love is an
evil—von Sacher-Masoch reveals a seriously uneasy view of human relations. Venus in Furs is the only work of von
Sacher-Masoch’s to be translated into English, and as even people who haven’t
read the book know, its fame is certainly not because it’s about love.

The book starts with an epigraph
from the biblical book of Judith—a
book that narrates the story of a clever and powerful woman beheading
Holofernes, an Assyrian general—and then opens into an unnamed narrator’s
strange dream of an icy Venus who wears furs and who leads a philosophical
discussion about how women’s cruel nature increases man’s desire. When the
narrator awakens, he goes to meet with his friend Severin, to whom he relates
his dream. Severin is a strange and sober man who at times, the narrator
relates, “had violent attacks of sudden passion and gave the impression of being
about to ram his head right through a wall.” Noticing a painting in Severin’s
room depicting a northern Venus who wears furs and holds a lash that she uses
to subjugate a man who is clearly a younger Severin himself, the narrator
wonders aloud if the painting perhaps inspired his dream. After a short
discussion, a young woman enters to bring tea and food for the pair, and to the
narrator’s astonishment, a very slight offense on the woman’s part causes
Severin to berate, whip, and chase her from the room. Explaining that you have
to “break” a woman rather than let her break you, Severin produces a manuscript
from his desk that tells how he was ostensibly “cured” of his obsession with
being dominated by women.

Entitled “Confessions of a
Suprasensual Man,” this manuscript comprises all but the last few pages of the
rest of the novel. Entering into this frame, the narrator (and the reader)
finds Severin at a Carpathian health resort where he meets and falls in love
with a woman named Wanda, with whom he draws up and signs a contract that makes
him her legal slave and gives her full power over him. At first, because she
seems to like him and enjoy his company, Wanda shies away from the degradations
that Severin asks her to subject him to, but as she slowly allows herself to
take up her dominant role, she takes greater pleasure in torturing him and
increasingly grows to despise him for how he allows her to treat him.

Leaving the Carpathian mountains for
Florence, Wanda makes Severin dress and act like a common servant, forcing him
to sleep in disgusting quarters and keeping him isolated from her company
unless needed to serve some whim or another. These changes make Severin feel
the palpable reality of his desires, a reality that he was in no way prepared
for, but although he loathes his detestable new position, he finds himself
unable to resist—and to keep from requesting—new humiliations. At times Wanda
offers to put an end to their game, because she still has feelings of affection
toward him, but those feelings fade as her mantle of power gives her free rein
to use Severin for her increasingly twisted devices.

The breaking point comes when Wanda
finds a nearly superhuman lover in Florence and decides to make Severin subject
to him as well. Unable to bear subjugation to another man, Severin ultimately
finds himself “cured” of his need to be dominated by women. Telescoping back to
the novel’s outer frame, the narrator, who’s seen Severin’s current cruelty
toward women, asks him for “the moral” to all of this, and Severin answers that
a woman can only be a man’s slave or despot, adding the caveat that this
imbalance can only be remedied “when she has the same rights as he and is his
equal in education and work.”

Charlotte Rampling as Venus in Furs,by Helmut Newton, 1973

This egalitarian last touch squares
with von Sacher-Masoch’s socialist leanings, but clearly the events and
stresses of the novel—which were mirrored closely in von Sacher-Masoch’s
personal life, both before and after writing it—prefer wallowing in inequity
much more that eradicating it. And this has been the novel’s main appeal for
readers ever since. Unlike the works of the great de Sade, which soar as
striking feats of both writing and imagination, Venus in Furs is much more of a masochistic sex fantasy than an artistic
piece of literature. Its symbolic orders are muddled; its philosophical
excursions are both ponderous and corny; and although its characters are vivid
and memorable, they too often fall into “types” rather than exist as fully
explored individuals. Still, it’s a curious and often enjoyable read, and whether
you take it as literature or as psychology—or as erotica—there’s no question
that this book’s whip will leave a distinct mark on your imagination.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Missing Keys, Stunted Blooms, and

Emerging Enchanters:

Best known for
his extraordinary English-language novels, particularly Lolita, which he suggested in its 1956 afterward was a record of his love affair with the English language, Vladimir
Nabokov had almost as distinguished a literary career in his native Russian
language, publishing nine novels and countless stories and poems and plays
while living as an émigré in Berlin between 1923 and 1937, a period that ended
when Nabokov and his wife, Véra (who was Jewish), fled a regime that was even
more insane than the one they and their families had fled almost two decades
earlier in Russia. Nabokov claimed in the same afterward that his English was a feeble shadow of
his magisterial Russian—an astonishing thing to imagine—but his precarious
years in Germany left him and his fellow exiles with an extremely limited
reading audience and opportunity to thrive as working artists. While his
Russian works are almost as vividly modern and ambitious as his later English works,
Nabokov’s writing in these years can be likened to an amber encapsulation of
Russia’s great literary past, which in many ways he both culminated and
exhausted, in part because of how his works serve as a brilliant coda for a
scattered tradition and in part because of how his severed relationship to his
homeland made it impossible for his use of the language to grow and evolve for
the rest of his life. His estrangement from living Russian became startlingly
evident to him when, decades later, he translated Lolita into Russian
and was shocked to discover that he had no idea what the Russian words for such
modern terms as “glove compartment” were. Still reveling in artistic
possibility in Berlin, however, Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, is a tiny
diamond of loveliness, while later Russian novels such as The Eye and Laughter
in the Dark and Despair are all masterpieces of grotesque and
glorious strangeness. Perhaps only somewhat intentionally, never knowing which
way history would turn, but probably suspecting that that he’d never get to
return home, his final Russian novel, The Gift, features a tour through
Russian literature that serves as a swan song for Nabokov’s fertile but
increasingly uprooted relationship with his native literary soil.

Detailing the artistic growth of a
Russian émigré writer named Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in 1920s Berlin, The
Gift, like so many of Nabokov’s other works, features a protagonist who
shares much of the author’s history and aesthetic and intellectual
predilections. This is not an autobiographical novel, however, as Nabokov
insists in his foreword to the book’s English translation, but even though
Godunov-Cherdyntsev is not a disguised version of the author, the book still
paints a fascinating panorama of the world in which Nabokov, like his novel’s
invented young writer, began his literary apprenticeship. Nabokov also
significantly notes that the heroine of the novel isn’t Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s
girlfriend, Zina, but rather Russian literature itself, which the novel’s progressions imitate and often mock, ravishing it the way that Nabokov ravishes Lolita’s own true heroine, the English language.

The opening chapter finds
Godunov-Cherdyntsev having just moved into a new flat on the same week that his
first book of poems has been published. With significance that will be mirrored
and amplified in the final chapter, the young writer is out walking and doesn’t
have the key to get into his flat—an accidental linguistic pun: there’s a
repeatedly missing clef in this non-roman à clef. Through a
series of reflections and samples and authorial explications, the reader enters
into Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s early life through his poems, which in his case are
keys to his autobiography, both personal and artistic. Subsequent chapters of The Gift evoke Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai
Gogol in both literary mode and subject matter as they follow Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s
desires and plans to write a great novel about his father, who was/is an
explorer who disappeared before the Russian Revolution and who haunts his son’s
dreams of both life and art. Delving into Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s research and
notes for his projected novel, The Gift in many ways is that
novel, but The Gift’s self-reflexive nature insists on being and
encompassing more—and unfortunately, though its single-minded focus on the
processes of (and varied critical reactions to) artistic creation, it often
offers much less.

The Gift’s serious wrong-turn
comes in Chapter Four, which comprises a brutally mocking biographical
appraisal of the life and work of the nineteenth-century critic and writer
Nikolay Chernyshevski, whose social novel What is to Be Done? (What
to Do? in Nabokov’s translation) inspired generations of revolutionaries, most
notably Lenin, who reused the novel’s title as the name of one of his most
influential political tracts. Serving for Nabokov and Godunov-Cherdyntsev as
both a historical and an artistic catastrophe—the novel so hackneyed and
over/underwrought that even in my Russophile youth I was unable to force myself
to read it in full—Chernyshevski’s work and life find themselves relentlessly
drawn and quartered within The Gift’s hundred-page diversion away from
literary exploration and into literary impalement. Inspired by a coincidence of
names and influences, and perhaps needing to develop his prose muscles before
writing the book that he wants to write, Godunov-Cherdyntsev embarks upon this
cruel and pointless display of virtuosic learning as a reaction to the
wrong-turn he feels that history and literary thought have taken.
Aesthetically, politically, and personally, this book-within-a-book is spot-on,
and it’s in fact amazingly informative and often hilarious, especially in its
ingenious bending of facts and dates and authorities, its dizzying contortions working to make its final twists extra ruthless, but all in all this brilliant tour-de-force is a serious drag on the novel’s thrust
and leaves a bitter aftertaste that mars the beautiful arc of The Gift’s
mirror of Russian literature, which may in fact be Nabokov’s plan in reflecting
the vicissitudes of art in his lost country’s lost mind.

Nabokov has great fun having his characters—and even his invented author—criticize this work of creative criticism, whose circular structure Nabokov would later reprise in his own much more favorable (but still critical) book on Gogol, but this long chapter’s elaborately dense trashing/thrashing of its subject takes Nabokov’s often childish invectives to a new low. Like Dante, who even in the most intoxicating celestial spheres can’t help spewing his obloquy upon the disappointments of reality, Nabokov’s hatreds overtake him constantly, and while he usually satisfies himself with a few crushing words about the things he despises and then moves along to the glories of his own artistic universe, this novel contents itself with highlighting negativity rather than aspiring to the heights. In a novel in which Russian literature is ostensibly the heroine, it’s surprising—and telling—that Tolstoy and his work are mentioned exactly three times, while so much time and space and energy are expended upon a writer whose work and influence Nabokov sees as a tremendous waste of time and space and energy.

Leaving
this lamentable chapter behind and moving forward, Godunov-Cherdyntsev
surges toward full artistic maturity—as well as full union with Zina—and this
final chapter simply dazzles as Nabokov delights in all the pleasures and
opportunities available to a novelist in full control of his language and his
artistic form. The book often shifts from third person to first person, with
Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s inner voice supplanting the novel’s outer narration, and
with so much literary discussion and sleight-of-hand at play, The Gift often serves as a metafictional
dialogue about its own devices and structures and aesthetics. The ending
especially leads the book back (or forward) toward itself, and while this
Möbius-strip contrivance could simply seem contrived in another writer’s hands,
Nabokov and his readers thrill to Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s discovery of the key to
his own masterwork as he and Zina walk together, happily keyless, to the flat
that contains their shared future.

The
sad thing about all this is that the novel’s surge forward simply ends here and
doesn’t bloom into anything near the level of Tolstoy, who Nabokov possibly
could have matched as a novelist in Russian under vastly different
circumstances but whose rarefied company Nabokov would join only after
switching to English. The Gift has much in common with James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a novel that Nabokov detested—and
it’s disheartening that Nabokov had to stop with Godunov-Cherdyntsev
discovering how to write the novel that we’ve just read rather than moving on
to write a Russian Ulysses, a novel that Nabokov revered, and which also
features a main character wandering around keyless. A fascinating glimmer of
Nabokov’s future literary mastery comes from a wholly unexpected direction,
though, and quite ironically. About halfway through the novel, Zina’s
detestable stepfather mentions a novel that he’d like to write himself, “from
real life”:

An old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoyevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul….

This is of course the seed for Lolita,
which takes a far darker course than the one that Zina luckily evaded. Even the
grossly nostalgic “once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry
old soul” prefigures Lolita’s use of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” in its opening
pages:

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.

Near the end of The Gift,
Godunov-Cherdyntsev writes a letter to his mother in Paris and discusses his
thoughts of writing a “classical novel” and lampoons the “brash trash” that he
sees being “considered the crown of literature,” and among his list of despised
topics is “incest.” How fitting then that a novel on this rejected topic—and
not a classical novel in the vein of Tolstoy—would become his masterpiece, the
“crown of literature” that he would never achieve in Russian.

Almost two decades separate The Gift and Lolita, and during that time Nabokov dedicated himself to the
exploration of the English language’s wild wilderness,
but there’s a significant link between the two novels—and it’s in his native
Russian. In 1939, just after completing his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
Nabokov composed a remarkable novella in Russian that he called The Enchanter, an ur-Lolita that he later described as “the
first little throb” of the great work that would consume his life between 1949
and 1955—and for years afterward, the novel becoming such a sensation that it
changed his life forever. He was dissatisfied with The Enchanter upon completing it and reading it aloud, and in 1957
he recalled that he’d thrown it away—he’d nearly done the same thing with Lolita, which he abandoned several times
and which his wife once had to retrieve from the trash can. In 1959, Nabokov
discovered The Enchanter in his
archives and found it more pleasing than he remembered, and he proposed that it
be translated into English by his family, which didn’t happen until 1986 when
his son, Dmitri, undertook the task, nearly a decade after Nabokov’s death.

Following all these trails of
artistic thread through Nabokov’s work, it’s startling—but not surprising—to
find that even the “little throb” of Lolita’s
precursorhad a precursor. And not in
a princedom by the sea, but in the Nazi Germany of the mid-to-late 1930s, in a
novel in which the protagonist rejects a theme that reflects the sickness of
both a repulsive old man and a literary and historical scene that had little
place for truly great Russian literature. The
Gift tells the story of one young writer’s growing literary gift, but this
gift—in Nabokov’s case—was unfulfillable, even in a novel of The Gift’s scope and complexity. Only
when he took up and fully explored the hauntingly vile subject that
Godunov-Cherdyntsev so adamantly pushes away from himself—and only after giving
up the dream of achieving a true masterwork in Russian—would Nabokov find the
key to the literary apotheosis that his own gift so richly deserved.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Published in
1939, Ask the Dust is the best-known work from John Fante’s quartet of
novels featuring the character Arturo Bandini, a young, struggling
Italian-American writer who served as Fante’s fictionalized literary and
personal alter ego. In 1933, Fante wrote The Road to Los Angeles, a
novel that wound up as the second chronological volume of the series, but it
wasn’t published until 1985, during a resurgence in Fante’s popularity, and
after several more years of trying to support himself by writing short stories,
he dug into his childhood to write a prequel to The Road to Los Angeles
called Wait Until Spring, Bandini, which in 1938 became his first
published novel. Wait Until Spring, Bandini follows the travails of
Svevo Bandini, a bricklayer trying to raise a family that includes the young
Arturo. The novel was a very
minor success, both commercially and artistically—it reads more like a pained
reverie than like a work of serious literary art, but it afforded Fante the
time and means to plan and construct the more popular and mature Ask the
Dust, which he published the following year.

Finding the journeyman writer Arturo
Bandini in Los Angeles (and passing over the intervening time covered in The
Road to Los Angeles), Ask the Dust opens with what scores of
subsequent novels and films have turned into a tired cliche: the unsuccessful,
inexperienced, and uninspired young writer faced with eviction from his cheap
hotel. He’s weeks behind in his rent, and he’s writing almost nothing because
he has nothing to write about, and his sense of artistic worth hangs on having
published just one short story in a magazine edited by J. C. Hackmuth, a
fictionalized version of H. L. Mencken (who was the first editor to accept any
of Fante’s stories for publication). Bandini spends his days wandering and
loafing, and when he writes, it’s either letters to his mother in Colorado,
telling of his successes, or letters to Hackmuth, telling of his failures.

Part of Arturo’s problem (he feels)
is that he has no experience with women, and one night he meets a Mexican
barmaid named Camilla, with whom he slowly embarks on a confusing and cruel
courtship that serves as the novel’s substantive center. While their romance
goes in malicious circles, however, Arturo meets Vera Rivkin, whose life and
death become the inspiration for his first novel, which gets publishes near the
end of Ask the Dust. Thus Fante avoids the cliche of having Arturo
publish the very book we’re reading,
and the disparity between Arturo’s often unsympathetic acts toward Camilla and
his deeply empathic exploration of Vera in the novel he writes illustrates how
the creation of art can draw out the truest and best aspects of humanity from
within a deeply flawed creator. Despite the divergent dynamics in Arturo’s
relationships with Camilla and Vera, his experiences with the two women contain
mirrors that allow Arturo to see himself more clearly, and as he matures as an
artist through Vera’s story, he also comes to mature as a human being in his
relationship with and attitude toward Camilla.

This isn’t to say that things go
well at all for Arturo and Camilla, because the complications of love, life,
and death intervene to keep things from working out in any way but an artistic
one. Near the beginning of the novel, Arturo refers to Los Angeles with a
spirit of love and loss that serves as a parallel for his physical and
emotional feelings for Camilla:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me
the way I came to you, with feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so
much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

At the end of
the novel Arturo throws a copy of his own novel into the desert in Camilla’s
memory, his novel—like Camilla—a sad flower that both springs from and returns
to the desert sands.

Screenwriter and director Robert
Towne (author of the great L.A. film Chinatown and director of a breathtakingly
bad film adaptation of Ask the Dust) once called Ask the Dust the
greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles. Fans of more artistically and
thematically ambitious novels such as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust
or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 may disagree, but Ask the
Dust certainly creates an indelible portrait of Depression-era L.A. in all
its motley variety. Fante’s prose isn’t incredibly penetrating or vivid
(although there are occasional weird flights of whimsy, or memorably phrased
descriptions of existence, such as “I went to the restaurant where I always
went to the restaurant”), and so this novel will have a much greater appeal to
readers who care more about content than artistry. In fact, Charles Bukowski
(who was largely responsible for bringing Fante’s work back into print) serves
as a good (or bad) example of Fante’s artistic legacy. In his introduction to
the 1979 reprint of Ask the Dust, Bukowski dismisses much of the writing
he came across in his youth as mere “subtlety, craft and form” written by
authors “playing word-tricks,” and he describes his discovery of Fante as a
kind of revelation: “The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow.
Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it.”

Whether
you regard this appraisal as philistine nonsense or not, it does account for
some of Fante’s approach and appeal. But Bukowski is only partially correct in
saying that the works of the writer whom he refers to as his god are “written
of and from the gut and the heart.” Fante wrote this novel from a carefully
planned outline and put much thought and craft—and deeply reflective
self-criticism—into Ask the Dust, and the results are far removed from
the macho swagger, self-aggrandizement, and first-draft bluster of his drunken
disciple, who modeled his own literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski, after Arturo
Bandini. Ask the Dust may not be the equal of the European Modernists of
Fante’s time, but this sad flower from the sand of Los Angeles has a wholly
singular beauty that’s well worth the trip west, regardless of whatever
literary landscapes its spores propagated later.

Monday, April 11, 2011

A Very Rough Diamond:

Although not as ubiquitous as the various versions and
adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—which predate Shakespeare and which afterward
have spread to nearly every language and art form in the world—the story of
Tristan and Iseult is one of the most potent and enduring tales of doomed love
in Western literature. As a freestanding romance, or as part of the
Arthur-cycle, or as an opera or film or inspiration for a novel (Graham
Greene’s excellent The Heart of the Matter, for instance), this strange and
mutable story of love and death is one of our central narratives about how
romantic love does and doesn’t work.

In brief,
the story goes like this: The orphaned Tristan joins his uncle Mark’s court at
Cornwell, proves himself a worthy warrior, goes on a wooing expedition to
Ireland to win Iseult the Fair for Mark, brings her back by boat, and
accidentally drinks a love-potion with her that was intended to bond her to
Mark. The pair then embark on an illicit affair that after discovery leads them
to escape together into the wilderness, where after a time they become
reconciled to returning to Mark’s court, where they continue their affair,
which is discovered again, causing Tristan to flee to lands in Brittany.
Joining another court there, he resigns himself to marrying his new sovereign’s
sister, who also happens to be named Iseult (in Béroul’s version, both women’s names
are spelled Yseut). When Tristan is mortally wounded in battle, he sends a
message to the first Iseult (who is a powerful healer), but the second Iseult
(Iseult of the White Hands) overhears his instructions and foils them, causing
Tristan to die just before the arrival of Iseult the Fair, who in despair lays
down next to Tristan and dies of grief.

Like the
tales of King Arthur, whose love-triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and
Lancelot is predated and influenced by the Mark-Iseult-Tristan triangle, the
story of Tristan and Iseult is almost definitely Celtic in origin, and as with
the Arthurian tales, its descent through different ages and traditions has
spawned interpretations that mirror the values and conventions of each culture
that retells it. The earliest extant full (or nearly full) versions fall into
two categories: the “common,” of which Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan is the
most exemplary, and the “courtly,” of which the mostly lost Tristran of Thomas
served as the template, later finding its highest expression in Gottfried von
Strassburg’s unfinished Tristan. As a product of evolving folklore, it’s not
possible to arrive at the true original version of the story, but almost all of
its core elements are present in Béroul’s version, and this is probably why his
Romance of Tristan has come down to us, fragmentary and peculiar as it is.

Nothing is
known about Béroul other than that he composed the poem in Norman French in the
middle of the twelfth century, and even this is somewhat uncertain. Béroul
refers to himself and his version of the tale throughout the poem, but some
scholars have suggested that this “Béroul” may have been a later scribe who
either embellished the poem or simply inserted his name to make the poem his.
In any of these cases, the only surviving manuscript is poorly copied and
incomplete, the ravages of time having torn away both the beginning and the end
and created several short lacunae throughout the text. Presenting even more
problems for a modern reader looking for a complete and coherent narrative,
what’s left of the poem itself (about 3,000 lines) is rife with incongruity,
illogical motivation, strange assumptions, and unclear characterization. The
accumulation of narrative inconsistencies is often hilarious, but even so, the
poem’s raw power and unadorned thrust makes it as enjoyable and moving as many
much “finer” Medieval romances. What Béroul lacks in subtlety and precision, he
more than makes up for with his gift for keeping the reader engaged in his
vivid, exciting, and heartwrenching rendering of this dramatic and ruinous love
(to borrow a phrase from Jeanette Winterson). Like the early gospel of Mark,
which served as the template for the more elaborately fleshed out gospels of
Matthew and Luke, Béroul’s version shocks and amuses with its roughness, but it
nonetheless stands as the startling original.

In order to
create a more complete and comprehensible reader’s edition, translator Alan S.
Fedrick has filled in the holes at the beginning and end by adding summaries of
Joseph Bédier’s 1900 reconstruction of the romance (which Bédier traced back to
a conjectural lost prototype of the poem by drawing on all known sources), as
well as by including a short anonymous episode, “The Tale of Tristan’s
Madness,” near the end. Fedrick also puts the poem’s style and approach in the
context of its times with his excellent introduction, which draws attention to
the poem’s oddities and clumsinesses while helping the reader to see them as a
common characteristic of the part-oral/part-written style of his era. Fedrick’s
apologies aren’t fully convincing, however—or even necessary—because Béroul has
the agency to make his own mistakes, and his poem has the verve to remain
unfazed by its own carelessness. Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan may not be an
imperfect masterpiece anywhere near the scale of, say, Don Quixote, but this
wonderfully memorable and poignant poem clearly stands on its own lopsided
terms as one of the great flawed gems of Western literature.